The greatest threat to civil liberties? Government

By DICK NEWBERT

Sunday

Jun 30, 2013 at 12:01 AMJun 30, 2013 at 6:00 AM

The president, Congress, Supreme Court justices and federal officials swear to “support, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Regretfully, their oaths have become casualties to partisan politics and quests for power!

Administration and congressional Democrats and Republicans continue to play fast-and-loose with the Constitution; facilitating far-reaching assaults on personal liberties, and permitting state/local authorities to do likewise.

Their tactics center on instilling fear among the public and then routinely sacrificing liberty in the name of security.

Our government has squandered trillions while restricting basic freedoms in its “war on drugs.” Tenants charged with no crime are evicted from homes where police believe drugs are sold. The Supreme Court has permitted warrantless searches of automobiles, the use of anonymous tips and drug-courier profiles as the basis for police searches, and the seizure of lawyers’ fees in drug cases. Property where drugs are found can be forfeited even if the owner is charged with no crime.

Our government told us these actions were necessary for our own good and, “Trust us!”

In the wake of 9/11, the Patriot Act (enacted under the guise of reforming existing laws to enable intelligence agencies to more effectively protect against and fight terrorism) authorized unprecedented changes to many fundamental civil liberties; permitting police to enter one’s home without warrants or probable cause; warrantless tapping of citizens’ phones and monitoring their Internet activities; secretly accessing the personal financial, health and other records of Americans; incarcerating citizens indefinitely without charging them with any crime, providing them access to legal counsel or granting them the right to an impartial and speedy trial.

We’re told the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act courts (which have authorized 99.6 percent of its requests) provide the necessary safeguards. However, as it operates in secret, its rulings are not reviewable and cannot be challenged, and individuals/companies whose records are sought are legally barred from disclosing such information, there are no reasonable checks and balances on which the public can rely.

Again, our nanny state politicians have preached the gospel of “security” and we’re told, “Trust us!”

Now, we discover our government is collecting and monitoring the phone records of nearly everyone in the United States, Americans’ Internet and email activities are tracked, the IRS has become clearly politicized in its dealing with opposition groups, the Supreme Court has just upheld the right of police departments to take DNA samples from anyone arrested, regardless of our “innocent until proven guilty” doctrine; the personal records of journalists are confiscated and these reporters are threatened with criminal prosecution for doing their jobs; and then there is the smoke screen obfuscating the government’s incompetence resulting in the Benghazi debacle where four Americans needlessly lost their lives and the orchestrated campaign of misinformation in its immediate aftermath.

Incredibly, the president, his senior staff, secretaries and other high-ranking members of his Cabinet claim to have had no knowledge of these events until they became public. Some have been caught lying during testimony to Congress on these crucial matters!

Yet, the president, his minions and many members of Congress continue to repeat the mantra of, “Trust us!”

“We the People,” coerced through fear, intimidation and deceit, together with our own apathy, have enabled Republican- and Democratic-led Congresses and administrations to vastly expand the authority of the federal government (which the Founding Fathers specifically sought to limit) while effectively dismantling many of our liberties enumerated in the Bill of Rights (without which the Constitution would never have been ratified).

It is not surprising a distrust of our government is on the increase among liberals and conservatives alike!

Paraphrasing Benjamin Franklin and others, those willing to sacrifice liberty for security will, in the end, achieve neither. Rather, the proper way to balance security and liberty is not to balance them at all but to require policies that maximize both.

Dick Newbert, Middletown, is a retired entrepreneur, and blogs at “The Legacy of 1776.com.”

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